If I didn’t write to you quickly this Sunday morning while the canvases I’ve begun are drying a little in the sun, I would wait even longer to answer your kind letter.
I hope that you’re well, and Mother too, I think of you two very often, I was scarcely able to foresee, when I went from Nuenen to Antwerp, that the course of events would keep me away for so long and at such a distance. That’s perhaps why my thoughts often still stray involuntarily to those parts, and it seems to me then that I’m continuing the same work left unfinished there, when so many things in nature remain parallel. Although I feel with an obstinate ingratitude that my health is returning little by little, the fact is that I am well; but as I tell you, the desire to begin again, the joy of living, is hardly great.

I’ve just finished a landscape of an olive grove with grey foliage more or less like that of the willows, their cast shadows violet on the sun-drenched sand. Then yet another that depicts a field of yellowing wheat surrounded by brambles and green bushes. At the end of the field a little pink house with a tall and dark cypress tree that stands out against the distant purplish and bluish hills, and against a forget-me-not blue sky streaked with pink whose pure tones contrast with the already heavy, scorched ears, whose tones are as warm as the crust of a loaf of bread. I have yet another in which a field of wheat on the slope of the hills is completely ravaged and knocked to the ground by a downpour, and which is drenched by the torrential shower.

It seems to me that the people here work a lot less than the peasants in our country, one scarcely sees any cattle, and the countryside almost always has more of a deserted look than it does at home. This seems most deplorable to me, all the more so since nature isn’t ungenerous and the air is so pure and so healthy. So one would wish to see a more energetic race of people here. The cases aren’t perhaps rare here where doing nothing becomes doing bad. In the north, aren’t there heaps of honest workmen without enough bread because there one works so much that work is no longer valued? I don’t say that this is always the case, but anyway there’s something of that kind however.

Ah well, the farms here could produce three times what they do if they were well-kept, and the whole land if it was manured. By producing three times as much, the land here could thus feed a lot more people. Now I think you asked me if, still supposing that love is a bacillus (which I myself am not in a position to state or prove, please don’t lose sight of that), I think that you asked me if there are people who would have the said bacillus and others who wouldn’t have it, or if on the contrary it was a fatal and universal illness.

On that point, too, I’m rather unqualified to form a clearly well-founded opinion. But I consider it probable that if a person, yourself say, is convinced she didn’t have it, it would perhaps be wise for such a person to have herself inoculated with the said bacillus according to the Pasteur or some other method. Joking apart, I believe that a man or woman inevitably has to be in love with something, and that the only precaution one can take would be to fall in love in such and such a way and not in another one, according to one’s ideas.

And to know what one wants in such matters – alas we know ourselves so little.
Besides, I’d almost think that women take the offensive in these matters; that the wise ones among them, or rather those who have the most correct and sure instinct, don’t wait to be loved in order to love themselves – which – and I’m inclined to believe for good reasons – would appear to be the essential thing to them.
Anyway, it could very well be that by being inoculated with the attenuated bacillus, of the well-chosen virus and in the correct dose, one would be better protected from contagion. If one doesn’t yet have the illness one doesn’t prevent oneself perhaps getting it, while when one has it one can no longer catch it.

I’m quite curious to have some news of Theo, who appears pretty absorbed in his honeymoon, which is very good. He sent me some colours and canvas last week, but it will soon be a month since I had news of him by letter. It’s a great consolation for me to know that he no longer lives alone. His wife wrote me a very nice letter a while ago, which proved to me that she’s really serious. She’ll certainly still need this, and for a long time to come, for Theo’s life is quite complicated because of his duty towards Boussod & Co. And as for her, she’ll learn more to live with him than without him, without being obliged to change too much and forget what she already knows of Dutch things.

I’m going off to work a little more, so as I finish I wish you and Mother all good fortune and health. I kiss you affectionately in thought.

As the saga continues, in this next letter that Vincent wrote to Willemien van Gogh, Date: Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, Tuesday, July 2, 1889, Vincent discusses such topics as: Catharina du Quesne van Bruchem-Van Willis, a cancer patient nursed by Elisabeth and Willemien, who died in Soesterberg on May 17, 1889, the books, "Le sens de la vie", "Un philosophe sous les toits" and "Monsieur, madame et bébé", 12 drawings, a boarding school he attended in the North-Brabant town of Zevenbergen from 1864 to 1866, Dutch cooking and one of your favorites Preziosi! Shakespeare! "The Kings series" Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI and King Lear.

My dear sister,

In recent days I already began another letter in reply to yours, but I became aware that I didn’t have sufficient mastery of my mind to write. I thank you and Lies for the Rod book which I’ve finished and which I’ll return to you soon. The terrible title, Le sens de la vie, terrified me a little, but as it’s happily scarcely spoken of in this volume, I was quite content to read something which has a family resemblance to Souvestre’s Le philosophe sous les toits or with Monsieur, madame et bébé by Droz. The moral of it is that in some cases a gentleman ends up preferring to live with a nice, devoted wife and his child, to the life of the restaurant, boulevard and café which he had previously led without too much excess. That’s undoubtedly very pleasant.

It is indeed remarkable that good Mrs du Quesne’s illness came to an unexpected end after all. It must have been a day of great deliverance for her all the same.
If you say in your letter that when you see so many others in life who come and go, seeking their own path, appearing to you perhaps to be making more headway than you, what can I tell you, that I too sometimes have a feeling of stupefaction in the face of my own life, and as regards several other lives of workers in my profession besides. I’ve just sent Theo a dozen drawings after canvases which I have on the go, while all the rest of my life is absolutely as inept as it was at the time when, at the age of I was at a boarding school where I learned absolutely nothing.

An enormous number of painters who certainly couldn’t do my canvases either in 2 months or in are regarded as artists and as intelligent people in town or in the countryside. But believe me, I say this in order to be explanatory and not because I would see any urgency or possibility or desire to change things. We scarcely know life, we’re so unaware of its hidden aspects, anyway we’re living in an age when everything appears to be in its dotage and tottering, and it isn’t unfortunate to find a duty which forces us to stay calmly in our corner, occupied with a little simpler toil, with certain duties that retain some raison d’être. these days in which we live we risk coming back from a battle ashamed of having done battle.

So my friend who was with me in Arles (van Gogh is referring to, Paul Gauguin.) and a few others have thus organized an exhibition in which, in good health, I would have taken part. And what have they been able to do – almost nothing – and yet in their canvases there was something brand new, good, something to give me pleasure and make me enthusiastic for example, me, I can assure you of that. Among artists, we no longer know what to say to each other, we don’t know if we ought to laugh or cry about it, and doing, my word, neither one thing or the other, we are happiest when we find ourselves in possession of a little paint and canvas, the thing we also lack sometimes and which at least we can work on. But any idea of a regular life, any idea of awakening in ourselves or in others gentle ideas or sensations, all of this must necessarily appear pure utopia to us.

So although yesterday more than half a million francs were paid for Millet’s Angelus, don’t go believing that more souls will feel what was in Millet’s soul. Or that middle-class people or workers will begin to put in their houses the lithograph of that Millet Angelus, for example. Don’t go believing that the painters who are still working in Brittany among the peasants will have more encouragement for that matter, less of the same black famine that always surrounded Millet, above all more courage.
Alas, we often lack breath and faith, wrongly certainly but – and here we come back to the point – if, however, we want to work we must submit both to the stubborn harshness of the time and to our isolation, which is sometimes as hard to bear as exile. Now before us, after our years which have thus been lost, relatively speaking, poverty, illness, old age, madness and always exile. It is indeed the moment to say ‘blessed be Thebe, daughter of Telhui, priestess of Osiris, who never complained about anyone’.

Cherishing the memory of good people, wouldn’t that be worth more than being among the ambitious ones on the whole? I’m quite absorbed in reading the Shakespeare that Theo sent me here, where at last I’ll have the calm necessary to do a little more difficult reading. I’ve first taken the kings series, of which I’ve already read Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V and a part of Henry VI – as these dramas were the most unfamiliar to me. Have you ever read King Lear? But anyway, I think I shan’t urge you too much to read such dramatic books when I myself, returning from this reading, am always obliged to go and gaze at a blade of grass, a pine-tree branch, an ear of wheat, to calm myself.

So if you want to do as artists do, gaze upon the white and red poppies with the bluish leaves, with those buds raising themselves up on stems with gracious curves. The hours of trouble and battle will assuredly come and find us without our going to look for them. The separation from Cor will be hard. And it’s going to happen really soon. What else can one do, thinking of all the things whose reason one doesn’t understand, but gaze upon the wheatfields. Their story is ours, for we who live on bread, are we not ourselves wheat to a considerable extent, at least ought we not to submit to growing, powerless to move, like a plant, relative to what our imagination sometimes desires, and to be reaped when we are ripe, as it is?

I tell you, as for myself I think it would be wisest not to wish to get better, not to wish to regain more strength than now, and I’ll probably grow accustomed to it, to being cracked. A little sooner, a little later, what can that matter to me?

What you write about Theo’s health I know completely, nevertheless it is my hope that married life will completely restore him. I believe his wife to be wise and loving enough to take lots of care of him and to see that he doesn’t just eat restaurant food, but that he gets back to Dutch cooking. Dutch cooking is good, and so let her turn herself into something of a cook, let her take on a reassuring outer appearance, even if it’s a little rough. Theo himself is obliged to be a Parisian, but with that he absolutely needs what reminds him of his youth and his past. I, who have neither wife nor child, I need to see the wheatfields, and it would be difficult for me to exist in a town for long. So, knowing his character, I’m optimistic that his marriage will do him an enormous amount of good. Before we can form an idea of his health we must allow them a little time to take root within each other.

And afterwards, I dare also hope, she’ll have found lots of ways to make his life a little more pleasant than was the case before. For he has seen hard times. Anyway I must close this letter if I want it to go off today, and I don’t even have time to re-read it. So, if I’ve said too many silly things you will kindly excuse me. Look after yourself, don’t get too bored, and by cultivating your garden as you do, and the rest that you do, be well assured that you’re getting through a lot of work. I kiss you affectionately in thought.

In this letter, Alessandro, that Vincent van Gogh sent to his brother Theo, Date: Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, on or about Thursday, May 23, 1889. He discusses, more of his paintings, Gauguin, his rooms at St-Rémy, the other patients, the food they were fed, other people in his profession who went mad such as: Constant Troyon who began to notice the onset of paralysis at the end of 1863, and in April 1864 his intellectual faculties began to decline. After a spell in the madhouse in Vanves, his mother took him into her home, where he died in 1865, utterly insane.

Charles Marchal, whose progressive blindness caused him to suffer from depression, ended his life with a rifle-shot in 1877. And, Gustave Adolphe Jundt who died in 1884: having suffered for a long time from gout, which prevented him from working, he had thrown himself from his studio window in a fit of madness. Van Gogh also speaks of being diagnosed with epilepsy, hearing and seeing things and tells a few more jokes, among other things.

My dear Theo,
Your letter which I’ve just received gives me great pleasure. You tell me that J.H. Weissenbruch has two paintings in the exhibition — but I thought he was dead — am I mistaken? ( Yes. Van Gogh was in fact mistaken: Weissenbruch did not die until 1903.) He certainly is one hell of an artist and a good man, with a big heart too.
What you say about the Berceuse gives me pleasure; it’s very true that the common people, who buy themselves chromos and listen with sentimentality to barrel organs, are vaguely in the right and perhaps more sincere than certain men-about-town who go to the Salon.

Gauguin, if he’ll accept it, you shall give him a version of the Berceuse that wasn’t mounted on a stretching frame, and to Bernard too, as a token of friendship.
(Yes. Gauguin did in fact receive a painting of the Berceuse, as revealed by his letter of March 29, 1894 to Jo van Gogh-Bonger and Bernard also had a Berceuse in his possession from a letter he wrote to his mother from Cairo in September 1894, in which he reported that the Berceuse he had left with Tanguy had been sold for 600 francs.)

See But if Gauguin wants sunflowers it’s only absolutely fair that he gives you something that you like as much in exchange. Gauguin himself above all liked the sunflowers later, when he had seen them for a long time. You must know, too, that if you put them in this order: that is, the Berceuse in the middle and the two canvases of the sunflowers to the right and the left, this forms a sort of triptych. And then the yellow and orange tones of the head take on more brilliance through the proximity of the yellow shutters.

And then you will understand that what I was writing to you about it, that my idea had been to make a decoration like one for the far end of a cabin on a ship, for example. Then as the size gets bigger, the summary execution gets its raison d’être. The middle frame is then the red one. And the two sunflowers that go with it are those surrounded by strips of wood. You see that this framing of simple laths does quite well, and a frame like that costs only very little. It would be perhaps good to frame the green and red vineyards, the sower and the furrows and the interior of the bedroom with them too.

Here’s a new no. 30 canvas, commonplace again, like one of those chromos from a penny bazaar that depict eternal nests of greenery for lovers. Thick tree-trunks covered with ivy, the ground also covered with ivy and periwinkle, a stone bench and a bush of roses, blanched in the cold shadow. In the foreground a few plants with white calyxes. It’s green, violet and pink.

It’s just a question — which is unfortunately lacking in chromos from a penny bazaar and barrel organs — of putting in some style. Since I’ve been here, the neglected garden planted with tall pines under which grows tall and badly tended grass intermingled with various weeds, has provided me with enough work, and I haven’t yet gone outside. (Van Gogh means that he has not yet been outside the grounds of the asylum.)

However, the landscape of St-Rémy is very beautiful, and little by little I’m probably going to make trips into it. But staying here as I am, the doctor( Théophile Peyron) has naturally been in a better position to see what was wrong, and will, I dare hope, be more reassured that he can let me paint. I assure you that I’m very well here, and that for the time being I see no reason at all to come and board in Paris or its surroundings.

I have a little room with grey-green paper with two water-green curtains with designs of very pale roses enlivened with thin lines of blood-red. These curtains, probably the leftovers of a ruined, deceased rich man, are very pretty in design. Probably from the same source comes a very worn armchair covered with a tapestry flecked in the manner of a Diaz or a Monticelli, red-brown, pink, creamy white, black, forget-me-not blue and bottle green. Through the iron-barred window I can make out a square of wheat in an enclosure, a perspective in the manner of Van Goyen, above which in the morning I see the sun rise in its glory.

With this — as there are more than 30 empty rooms — I have another room in which to work. The food is so-so. It smells naturally a little musty, as in a cockroach-ridden restaurant in Paris or a boarding school. As these unfortunates do absolutely nothing (not a book, nothing to distract them but a game of boules and a game of draughts) they have no other daily distraction than to stuff themselves with chickpeas, haricot beans, lentils and other groceries and colonial foodstuffs by the regulated quantities and at fixed times. As the digestion of these commodities presents certain difficulties, they thus fill their days in a manner as inoffensive as it’s cheap. But joking apart, the fear of madness passes from me considerably upon seeing from close at hand those who are affected with it, as I may very easily be in the future.

Before I had some repulsion for these beings, and it was something distressing for me to have to reflect that so many people of our profession, Troyon, Marchal, Meryon, Jundt, M. Maris, Monticelli, a host of others, had ended up like that. I wasn’t even able to picture them in the least in that state. Well, now I think of all this without fear, i.e. I find it no more atrocious than if these people had snuffed it of something else, of consumption or syphilis, for example.

These artists, I see them take on their serene bearing again, and do you think it’s a small thing to rediscover ancient members of the profession. Joking apart, that’s what I’m profoundly grateful for. For although there are some who howl or usually rave, here there is much true friendship that they have for each other. They say, one must suffer others for the others to suffer us, and other very true reasonings that they thus put into practice. And between ourselves we understand each other very well, I can, for example, chat sometimes with one who doesn’t reply except in incoherent sounds, because he isn’t afraid of me.

If someone has some crisis the others look after him, and intervene so that he doesn’t harm himself. The same for those who have the mania of often getting angry. Old regulars of the menagerie run up and separate the fighters, if there is a fight.

It’s true that there are some who are in a more serious condition, whether they be filthy, or dangerous. (At the time of Van Gogh’s stay in the asylum, there were ten other patients in the ‘gentlemen’s quarters several of whom were very aggressive.) These are in another courtyard. Now I take a bath twice a week, and stay in it for 2 hours, then my stomach is infinitely better than a year ago, so I only have to continue, as far as I know. I think I’ll spend less here than elsewhere, since here I still have work on my plate, for nature is beautiful.

My hope would be that at the end of a year I’ll know better than now what I can do and what I want. Then, little by little, an idea will come to me for beginning again. Coming back to Paris or anywhere at the moment doesn’t appeal to me at all, I feel that I’m in the right place here. In my opinion, what most of those who have been here for years are suffering from is an extreme sluggishness. Now, my work will preserve me from that to a certain extent. The room where we stay on rainy days is like a 3rd-class waiting room in some stagnant village, all the more so since there are honourable madmen who always wear a hat, spectacles and travelling clothes and carry a cane, almost like at the seaside, and who represent the passengers there. (This room was on the ground floor, to the left of the entrance hall)

I’m obliged to ask you for some more colours, and especially some canvas. When I send you the 4 canvases of the garden (These four paintings of the garden – later in the letter Van Gogh says that they are no. 30 canvases – are Irises, Lilacs, Trees with ivy in the garden of the asylum and The garden of the asylum) I have on the go you’ll see that, considering that life happens above all in the garden, it isn’t so sad. Yesterday I drew a very large, rather rare night moth there which is called the death’s head, its coloration astonishingly distinguished: black, grey, white, shaded, and with glints of carmine or vaguely tending towards olive green; it’s very big. To paint it I would have had to kill it, and that would have been a shame since the animal was so beautiful. I’ll send you the drawing of it with a few other drawings of plants.

You could take the canvases which are dry enough at Tanguy’s or at your place off the stretching frames and then put the new ones you consider worthy of it onto these stretching frames. Gauguin must be able to give you the address of a liner for the Bedroom who won’t be expensive. This I imagine must be a 5-franc restoration, if it’s more then don’t have it done, I don’t think that Gauguin paid more when he quite often had canvases of his own, Cézanne or Pissarro lined.

Speaking of my condition, I’m still so grateful for yet another thing. I observe in others that, like me, they too have heard sounds and strange voices during their crises, that things also appeared to change before their eyes. And that softens the horror that I retained at first of the crisis I had,(Van Gogh is referring to the first attack of his illness) and which when it comes to you unexpectedly, cannot but frighten you beyond measure. Once one knows that it’s part of the illness one takes it like other things. Had I not seen other mad people at close hand I wouldn’t have been able to rid myself of thinking about it all the time. For the sufferings of anguish aren’t funny when you’re caught in a crisis.

Most epileptics bite their tongues and injure them. Rey told me that he had known a case where someone had injured his ear as I did, and I believe I’ve heard a doctor here who came to see me with the director say that he too had seen it before. I dare to believe that once one knows what it is, once one is aware of one’s state and of possibly being subject to crises, that then one can do something about it oneself so as not to be caught so much unawares by the anguish or the terror. Now, this has been diminishing for 5 months, I have good hope of getting over it, or at least of not having crises of such force. There’s one person here who has been shouting and always talking, like me, for a fortnight, he thinks he hears voices and words in the echo of the corridors, probably because the auditory nerve is sick and too sensitive, and with me it was both the sight and the hearing at the same time which, according to what Rey said one day, is usual at the beginning of epilepsy.

Now the shock had been such that it disgusted me even to move, and nothing would have been so agreeable to me as never to wake up again. At present this horror of life is already less pronounced, and the melancholy less acute. But I still have absolutely no will, hardly any desires or none, and everything that has to do with ordinary life, the desire for example to see friends again, about whom I think however, almost nil. That’s why I’m not yet at the point where I ought to leave here soon, I would still have melancholy for everything. And it’s even only in these very last days that the repulsion for life has changed quite radically. There’s still a way to go from there to will and action. It’s a shame that you yourself are still condemned to Paris, and that you never see the countryside other than that around Paris.

I think that it’s no more unfortunate for me to be in the company where I am than for you always the fateful things at Goupil & Cie. From that point of view we’re quite equal. For only in part can you act in accordance with your ideas. Since, however, we have once got used to these inconveniences, it becomes second nature. I think that although the paintings cost canvas, paint &c., at the end of the month, however, it’s more advantageous to spend a little more thus, and to make them with what I’ve learned in total, than to abandon them while one would have to pay for board and lodging all the same anyway. And that’s why I’m making them. So this month I have 4 no. 30 canvases and two or three drawings.

But no matter what one does, the question of money is always there like the enemy before the troops, and one can’t deny it or forget it. I retain my duties in that respect as much as anyone. And perhaps some day I’ll be in a position to repay all that I’ve spent, because I consider that what I’ve spent is, if not taken from you at least taken from the family, so consequently I’ve produced paintings and I’ll do more. That is to act as you too act yourself. If I had private means, perhaps my mind would be freer to do art for art’s sake, now I content myself with believing that in working assiduously even so, without thinking of it one perhaps makes some progress.
Here are the colours I would need

Now Alessandro, In this letter, From: Vincent van Gogh To: Theo van Gogh
Date: Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, between about Friday,May 31 and about Thursday, June 6, 1889, Van Gogh speaks of: Doctor Peyron, how he feels sad for a new patient who breaks everything, shouts day and night and tears straitjackets. Paintings such as, the starry night, how he has no desire to leave the asylum and a few more books.

My dear Theo,
I still have to ask you to send me a few ordinary brushes as soon as possible, of more or less these sizes Half a dozen of each please.
I hope that you’re well and your wife too, and that you’ll enjoy a little of the good weather. At least here we have splendid sunshine. As for me, my health is good, and as for the head it will, let’s hope, be a matter of time and patience.

The director had a few words with me to say that he’d received a letter from you, and that he’d written to you.(Theo had written to Peyron on May 23, as emerges from his answer of May 26, 1889. Peyron informed Theo that Vincent was better and that he spent whole days drawing in the garden. He also said that he still thought that Vincent’s illness was connected with epilepsy.) To me he says nothing and I ask nothing of him, which is simplest. He’s a little gouty man — widowed a few years ago — who has very dark spectacles. As the establishment is a little moribund, the man appears to take only a rather half-hearted enjoyment in this profession, and besides there’s reason enough for it.

A new person has arrived who is so agitated that he breaks everything and shouts day and night, he also tears the straitjackets and up to now he scarcely calms down, although he’s in a bath all day long, he demolishes his bed and all the rest in his room, overturns his food &c. It’s very sad to see — but they have a lot of patience here and will eventually get there, however.(This newcomer was a 27-year-old man, ‘suffering from acute mania’, who had been admitted to the asylum on May 27. ‘He displays frenzied agitation, he screams and breaks everything’ (quoted from the admissions register, in Doiteau and Leroy 1928, p. 62). That this patient lay in the bath all day long was apparently part of the hydrotherapy treatment.)

New things become old so quickly — I think that if I came to Paris in the state of mind I’m currently in, I wouldn’t make any distinction between a so-called dark painting or a bright Impressionist painting, between a varnished painting in oils and a matt picture done with thinned paint. (Van Gogh is referring to the technique of peinture à l’essence – much used by Degas, Manet and Toulouse-Lautrec – in which the oil paints are highly diluted with spirits (‘essence de térébenthine’, terpentine) to obtain a matt and transparent effect.)

I mean by this that having reflected as time passed — I believe more than ever in the eternal youth of the school of Delacroix, Millet, Rousseau, Dupré, Daubigny, just as much as in the current one or even in artists to come. I scarcely believe that Impressionism will ever do more than the Romantics, for example.

It’s certainly a far cry between that and admiring people like Léon Glaize or Perrault.
This morning I saw the countryside from my window a long time before sunrise with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big.(This morning star was the planet Venus, which ‘had emerged from obscurity in the morning twilight during mid-May and became more prominent and higher in the morning sky through June’.) Daubigny and Rousseau did that, though, with the expression of all the intimacy and all the great peace and majesty that it has, adding to it a feeling so heartbreaking, so personal. These emotions I do not detest.

I still have remorse, and enormously when I think of my work, so little in harmony with what I’d have wished to do. I hope that in the long run it will make me do better things, but we aren’t there yet.
I think that you would do well to wash the canvases that are quite quite dry with water and a little spirits of wine to remove the oil and the thinner from the impasto. The same for the night café and the green vineyard, and above all for the landscape that was in the walnut frame. The night (This is Starry night over the Rhône, later in the letter Van Gogh actually calls it ‘the starry night’.) also (but that one has recent retouchings which might run with the spirits of wine).

I’ve been here almost a whole month, not one single time have I had the slightest desire to be elsewhere; just the will to work again is becoming a tiny bit firmer.
I don’t notice any very clear desire to be elsewhere in the others either, and this may very well come from the fact that one feels too decidedly broken for life outside.

What I don’t really understand is their absolute idleness. But that’s the great defect of the south, and its ruin. But what a beautiful land and what beautiful blue and what a sun. And yet I’ve only seen the garden and what I can make out through the window.

Have you read the new book by Guy de Maupassant, Fort comme la mort,(In Maupassant’s novel Fort comme la mort (1889), a painter receives a commission to paint the portrait of a noblewoman. The businesslike relations between the painter and his model grow into a mutual passion, despite the woman’s resolution never to surrender to his charms. Her beauty is fading and he takes an increasing interest in her daughter, who resembles her. When the daughter marries, the infatuated painter runs down the street in a frenzy and dies in a traffic accident. The novel first appeared in the Revue Illustré in instalments between February 1 and May 15, 1889, and was published in book form by Ollendorff in May 1889) what is its subject? What I read last in this category was Zola’s Le rêve, I found the figure of the woman, the embroiderer, very, very beautiful, and the description of the embroidery all in gold. Precisely because it’s like a question of colour, different yellows, whole and broken. But the figure of the man struck me as rather lifeless, and the great cathedral also made me as melancholy as hell. Only that lilac and dark blue repoussoir makes, if you will, the blonde figure stand out. But anyway, there are already things by Lamartine like that.

I hope that you’ll destroy a heap of things that are too bad in the heap I sent, or at least will only show the most passable ones.
As regards the exhibition of the Independents, it’s all the same to me, act as if I wasn’t there at all. To not be indifferent and not exhibit something too mad, perhaps the starry night and the landscape with yellow greenery which was in the walnut frame. Since these are two of contrary colours, and that might give others the idea of doing night effects better than I do.

Anyway you must absolutely stop worrying with regard to me now. When I receive the new canvas and the colours I’ll go out a bit to see the countryside.
Since it’s just the season when there are lots of flowers and thus colour effects, it will perhaps be wise to send me another metres of canvas in addition.
For the flowers will be short-lived and will be replaced by the yellow wheatfields. The latter, above all, I would like to capture better than in Arles. The mistral (since there are a few mountains here) appears far less annoying than in Arles, where you always get it at first hand.
When you receive the canvases I’ve done in the garden (in a previous letter, van Gogh said that he had painted four canvases of the garden. These were Irises, Lilacs, Trees with ivy in the garden of the asylum and The garden of the asylum)
you’ll see that I’m not too melancholy here.
More soon, good handshake in thought to you and to Jo.

In this letter, Alessandro, From: Vincent van Gogh To: Theo van Gogh and Jo van Gogh-Bonger. Date: Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, Thursday, May 9, 1889, Vincent writes two separate letters to each of them and discusses: the mad and cracked people in the "menagerie", more paintings, Paris and other artists. I've also included van Gogh's medical report. Now that's interesting!

My dear Theo,
Thanks for your letter. (On May 11, Jo wrote the following to her sister Mien about the present letter, the first from Saint-Rémy: ‘The news from Vincent is rather good – he is now no longer in Arles but in Saint-Rémy, where he will let himself be well taken care of for a couple of months – he always writes so cleverly – I’ve seldom read such letters – but his head is a bit worn out – I hope so much that rest will do him good. This week Theo showed us some splendid drawings by him – the things of his I saw in the beginning were mostly so strange – but there are also some that are much more understandable and ever so beautiful!’) You’re quite right to say that Mr Salles has been perfect in all of this, I’m much obliged to him.

I wanted to tell you that I think I’ve done well to come here, first, in seeing the reality of the life of the diverse mad or cracked people in this menagerie, I’m losing the vague dread, the fear of the thing. And little by little I can come to consider madness as being an illness like any other. Then the change of surroundings is doing me good, I imagine. As far as I know the doctor here is inclined to consider what I’ve had as an attack of an epileptic nature. But I haven’t made any enquiries.
(The admissions register of the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole contains the medical report sent by Dr Urpar from Arles about van Gogh. He stated that van Gogh ‘suffered an attack of acute mania with generalised delirium. At that time he cut off his ear. At present his condition has greatly improved, but he nevertheless thinks it helpful to be cared for in a mental asylum. The asylum’s physician, Dr Peyron, examined van Gogh and recorded his findings on May 9 and 25, 1889. On May 9, 1889 he wrote in the admissions register: ‘I consider that Mr van Gogh is subject to attacks of epilepsy, separated by long intervals, and that it is advisable to place him under long-term observation in the institution.’)

Have you by chance yet received the crate of paintings, I’m curious to know if they’ve suffered more, yes or no. have two others on the go — violet irises and a lilac bush. Two subjects taken from the garden. The idea of my duty to work comes back to me a lot, and I believe that all my faculties for work will come back to me quite quickly. It’s just that work often absorbs me so much that I think I’ll always be absent-minded and awkward in getting by for the rest of life too.
I won’t write you a long letter — I’ll try to answer the letter from my new sister, which greatly touched me, but I don’t know if I’ll manage to do it.

Handshake, and ever yours,
Vincent

My dear sister,
Thanks very much for your letter, in which I above all looked for news of my brother. And I find it very good. I can see that you have already observed that he loves Paris and that this surprises you a little, you who don’t like it, or rather who above all like the flowers there, such as, I suppose, for example, the wisterias which are probably beginning to flower. Could it not be the case that in liking a thing one sees it better and more accurately than in not liking it.

For him and for me Paris is certainly already a cemetery in a way, where many artists have perished, whom we knew directly or indirectly. Certainly Millet, whom you’ll learn to like a lot, and with him many others, have tried to get out of Paris. But Eugène Delacroix, for example, it’s difficult to portray him ‘as a man’ other than as a Parisian. All this to urge you — with all caution, admittedly — to believe in the possibility that there are homes in Paris, and not just apartments.

Anyway — fortunately you are now his home yourself. It’s quite odd perhaps that the result of this terrible attack is that in my mind there’s hardly any really clear desire or hope left, and I’m wondering if it is thus that one thinks when, with the passions somewhat extinguished, one comes down the mountain instead of climbing it. Anyway my sister, if you can believe, or almost, that everything is always for the best in the best of worlds then you’ll also be able to believe, perhaps, that Paris is the best of the towns in it.

Have you noticed yet that the old cab-horses there have big, beautiful heartbroken eyes, like Christians sometimes. Whatever the case, we’re not savages nor peasants, and we perhaps even have a duty to love civilization (so-called). Anyway, it would probably be hypocritical to say or believe that Paris is bad when one lives there. The first time one sees Paris it may be, besides, that everything there seems against nature, dirty and sad. Anyway, if you don’t like Paris, above all do not like painting nor those who directly or indirectly are engaged in it, for it’s only too doubtful whether that’s beautiful or useful.

But what can you do, there are people who love nature while being cracked or ill, those are the painters, then there are some who love what is done by the hand of man, and those even go as far as liking paintings. Although there are a few people here who are seriously ill, the fear, the horror that I had of madness before has already been greatly softened.

And although one continually hears shouts and terrible howls as though of the animals in a menagerie, despite this the people here know each other very well, and help each other when they suffer crises.(On May 25, 1889 Jo wrote to her sister Mien: ‘If only I could always make Theo happy then all is well. But Vincent keeps coming [back], Vincent who doesn’t share in happiness and contentment because it’s better to wear out than to rust out – work, struggle, and he’s so instilled that in Theo. His letters from Saint-Rémy are sad, yet he feels rather content, paints a lot – but what he says about all those lunatics around him – about accepting his fate – gives me pain. What will ever become of it?’)

They all come to see when I’m working in the garden, and I can assure you are more discreet and more polite to leave me in peace than, for example, the good citizens of Arles. It’s possible that I’ll stay here for quite a long time, never have I been so tranquil as here and at the hospital in Arles to be able to paint a little at last. Very near here there are some little grey or blue mountains,(Saint-Rémy lies at the foot of the Alpilles, a small massif.) with very, very green wheatfields at their foot, and pines.

I shall count myself very happy if I manage to work enough to earn my living, for it makes me very worried when I tell myself that I’ve done so many paintings and drawings without ever selling any. Don’t be in too much of a hurry to consider this an injustice, I don’t know anything at all about it.
Thanking you again for writing to me, and being very happy to know that now my brother doesn’t return to an empty apartment when he comes home in the evening, I shake your hand in thought, and believe me

Dear brother and sister.
Jo’s letter tells me a very great piece of news this morning, I congratulate you on it, and am very pleased to hear it. I was very touched by your reasoning when you say that as neither of you are in as good health as appears desirable on an occasion like this, you had a kind of doubt, and in any case a feeling of pity for the child to come traversed your soul. This child in this case, has it, even before its birth, been less well loved than the child of very healthy parents, whose first impulse would have been a keen joy? Surely not.

We know so little about life that we’re not really in a position to judge between good and bad, just or unjust, and to say that one is unhappy because one suffers hasn’t been proved. You should know that Roulin’s child came to them smiling and very healthy, while the parents were at bay. So take it as it is, wait with confidence and possess your soul with a long patience as an old saying has it, and with good will.(This is Derived from Luke 21:19.) Let nature take its course.

As to what you say about Theo’s health, my dear sister, while sharing your anxieties with all my heart I must nevertheless reassure you, precisely because I’ve seen that his health is changeable and uneven rather than weak, as is mine, for that matter.
I very much like to believe that illnesses sometimes cure us, i.e. that when the illness comes to a crisis it’s a thing necessary to the recovery of a normal state of body. No, subsequent to the marriage he’ll regain his strength, still having the reserve of youth and power to restore him.

I’m very pleased that he’s no longer alone, and truly I don’t doubt that he’ll regain his former temperament after a while. And then above all when he’s a father and the feeling of fatherhood comes to him, that will be a considerable gain.
In my life as a painter, and above all when I’m in the country, it’s not so difficult for me to be alone, because in the country one feels the bonds that unite us all more easily. But in town, as he has done his ten consecutive years with the Goupils in Paris, it isn’t possible to live alone. So with patience it will return.

I’m going to Arles tomorrow to fetch the canvases that are still over there, which I’ll send you shortly. And I’m going to send you some as soon as possible to try to give you peasant thoughts, even though you’re in town.
This morning I talked a little with the doctor here (Théophile Peyron.) he told me – which was absolutely what I had already thought – that one must wait a year before believing oneself to be cured, since the smallest thing could bring on another attack.

Then he offered to take my furniture here so that we don’t have double expenses.(van Gogh had stored his furniture in a room he rented from Mr and Mrs Ginoux.) Tomorrow I’ll go and talk about that in Arles with Mr Salles.
When I came here I left 50 francs with Mr Salles to settle up with the hospital in Arles, he’ll certainly have some over. But having again quite often needed various things, the surplus that Mr Peyron had here is exhausted. I’m a little surprised myself that in living with the greatest possible sobriety and regularity for the last 6 months, without having my independent studio, I’m not spending less or producing more than the previous, relatively less sober year.

And inwardly I feel neither more nor less remorse &c. if you like. Suffice to say that everything one calls good and bad is however quite relative, it seems to me. I live soberly here because I have the opportunity to. I drank before because I no longer knew how to do otherwise. Anyway it’s all the same to me!!! Sobriety, very calculated it’s true, nevertheless leads to a state of being in which thought, if you have any, flows more easily. Anyway it’s a difference like painting grey or coloured. I’m in fact going to paint more greyly.(This is a pun on the French word ‘gris’, which can mean both ‘grey’ and ‘tipsy’.)

Only instead of paying money to a landlord we’re giving it to the asylum, I don’t see the difference – and it’s scarcely cheaper. The work is a thing apart, and has always cost me a lot.
I thank you very much for the consignment of colours and canvas, which I’m very pleased with.(van Gogh had ordered paint) I hope to go and redo the olive trees. There are unfortunately very few vineyards here.
My health is good, though, and I have a feeling quite similar to the one I had when I was much younger, when I was also very sober, too much so, I believe they used to say. But it’s all the same, I’ll try to get by.

As regards being godfather to a son of yours, while first of all it could be a girl, truly, in the circumstances I would prefer to wait until I’m no longer here. Then Mother would certainly set her heart a little on him being called after our father, I for one would find that more logical in the circumstances.
I enjoyed myself very much yesterday reading Measure for measure.

(Shakespeare’s Measure for measure (1604-1605) is a complicated tragi-comedy with several sub-plots. The Duke of Vienna temporarily relinquishes his power in order to investigate, in disguise, the deterioration of morals – in particular the laxity in sexual morals – in his duchy.)

Then I read Henry VIII, in which there are such beautiful passages, like the one about Buckingham, and Wolsey’s words after his downfall.
(van Gogh is referring to: Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, (1623), act 2, scene 1, is a ‘mirror for magistrates’. While Henry VIII tries to overcome the problems created by his divorce, the fallen characters comment on their own ruin. Thus Henry, Duke of Buckingham and Earl of Stafford (1454-1483), is accused of high treason and sentenced to death. On the scaffold he addresses the crowd that has quickly gathered to witness his execution:
‘You few that lov’d me,
And dare be bold to weep for Buckingham,
His noble friends and fellows, whom to leave
Is only bitter to him, only dying;
Go with me like good angels to my end,
And as the long divorce of steel falls on me,
Make of your prayers one sweet sacrifice
And lift my soul to heaven. Lead on a’ God’s name.’
The manipulative Cardinal Wolsey (1471-1530), Archbishop of York, loses his wealth and power when his crimes are revealed. He forfeits his royal protection and is attacked from all sides. Full of remorse, Wolsey addresses his servant with great emotion (act 3, scene 2):
‘And when I am forgotten, as I shall be,
And sleep in dull cold marble, where no mention
Of me more must be heard of, say I thaught thee;
Say Wolsey, that once trod the ways of glory,
And sounded all the depths and shoals of honour,
Found thee a way (out of his wrack) to rise in ...
Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition,
By that sin fell the angels; how can man then,
The image of his maker, hope to win by it?
Love thyself last, cherish those hearts that hate thee;
Corruption wins not more than honesty.’)

I think I’m lucky to be able to read or re-read this at my leisure, and then I very much hope to read Homer at last. Outside the cicadas are singing fit to burst, a strident cry ten times louder than that of the crickets, and the scorched grass is taking on beautiful tones of old gold. And the beautiful towns of the south are in the state of our dead towns along the Zuiderzee, which were formerly lively. (Until the mid-eighteenth century, such Zuiderzee towns as Monnickendam, Edam, Hoorn, Enkhuizen and Medemblik were prosperous centres of trade. After this, they faced a period of economic decline.) While in the downfall and the decline of things, the cicadas dear to good old Socrates have remained.

(This is a Reference to the dialogue in Plato, Phaedrus, 230c and 259b-e, in which Socrates recounts the myth of the cicadas, devoted to the Muses. Enjoying the peace and quiet of nature, the philosopher is pleasantly accompanied by the chirring of the insects: ‘How lovely and perfectly charming the breeziness of the place is! and it resounds with the shrill summer music of the chorus of cicadas’.) And here, certainly, they’re still singing old Greek. friend Isaäcson heard them, his face would light up.

What Jo writes about you always eating at home, that’s perfect. Anyway, I think that’s going very well, and once again, while sharing with all my heart all possible worries about Theo’s health, within me the hope predominates that in this case a more or less sickly condition is only the result of the efforts of nature to right itself. Patience. Mauve always claimed that nature was good, and even a lot more than one usually thought. Is there anything in his past that proves that he was wrong. His fits of melancholy in his last days, do you think? I myself would be inclined to believe otherwise.
More soon, but I wanted to write to you straightaway that this morning’s news gives me great pleasure. Handshakes and

exaggerated in the work. That parents who are ignorant from the point of view of painting should stop loving a child who’s a little different from the rest – that’s certainly a terrible misunderstanding – but even if they understood painting, how could one reproach them for it too much in this society of money and military men? That’s why, if he did his military service, . (Emile Bernard’s military service) it wouldn’t be more unfortunate for him, it would be to admit in good time that one has been vanquished by fate.

What became of Vignon? (It is not known what Vincent is enquiring about here. Theo was in touch with Victor Vignon, one of the less successful Impressionists. The estate includes three of his works.)
Anyway, this is certain, it’s not a matter of putting on a proud front or having great hopes for what comes next. Let’s take the terrible realities as they are, and if I have to abandon painting I think I shall. In any case, I really want to see, one more time and with better health than two years ago, if I can’t find some sort of position. I’ve often told myself that if, two years ago, I’d had a calmer temperament like Seurat, for example, I could have resisted.

(Regarding the poem ‘Who is the maid? St. Jerome’s love’ by Thomas Moore)

Who is the maid my spirit seeks
Through cold reproof and slanders blight
Has she loves roses on her cheeks
Is hers an eye of calm delight?
No, wan and sunk with midnight prayer
As the worn looks of her I love
And if by chance a light be there
As fire was kindled from above
I choose not her mine hearts elect
Amongst those who seek their makers’ shrine
In gems and garlands proudly decked
As if themselves were things divine
And they who come in glittering dress
To mourn their frailty yet are frail
No heaven but faintly warm the breast
That beats beneath a broidered veil.
Not so the form of her I love
And... because her bloom is gone
But ne’er was beauty’s bloom so bright
So touching as that forms decay
That like the altars wavering light
In holy lustre fades away.
Infine, ti lascio con alcune delle parole più romantiche, toccanti, profondamente profonde, del tardo grande Dean Martin. Prendi nota, Preziosi!

(In Napoli where love is king
When boy meets girl here's what they say)
When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie
That's amore
When the world seems to shine like you've had too much wine
That's amore
Bells will ring ting-a-ling-a-ling, ting-a-ling-a-ling
And you'll sing "Vita bella"
Hearts will play tippy-tippy-tay, tippy-tippy-tay
Like a gay tarantella

When the stars make you drool just like a pasta fazool
That's amore
When you dance down the street with a cloud at your feet
You're in love
When you walk in a dream but you know you're not
Dreaming signore
Scuzza me, but you see, back in old Napoli
That's amore